Posts by Hollerith

Employee's silent rampage wipes out $2.5m worth of data

revenge is sweet

I was remaindered from a job and a month after I was shown the door with minimun legal pay-off they contacted me to ask about specialist web stuff -- advice about what should they do about this and that, and oh, about that stuff in the stylesheet, what did that mean? (I kid you not.) But surely these questions meant I wasn't redundant? Well I believed them when they said I was, so I didn't bother replying.

But I also hadn't bothered wreaking any havoc, because I knew that a company who would get rid of its web manager without thinking they might need to replace with the same skillset was going to torpedo itself sooner of later, and indeed that was the case.

Any company who leaves itself open to the possibility of a junior admin person deleting anything outside her remit in a frenzy deserves to be hammered. And no company with a proper back-up process in place needs to pay any specialists.

Own goal.

Autothrottle problems suspected in Heathrow 777 crash

2 hour rule refuted by personal experience

A flight from Santiago to Easter Island is about six hours. About two minutes after take-off, you are over the Pacific and, about one second before landing, you are over Easter Island.

The plane then spends six hours from Easter Island to Tahiti (although I did not take that further trip).

Believe me, there ain't nothing below you between Chile and Easter Island. For six hours.

They are VERY firm in the life-jacket demonstration. :)

Heathrow 777 crash flattens servers

they put in computers to counter human error, but...

Planes are pretty much run by computers now because the huge majority of plane crashes proved to be the fault of the wetware flying the plane. If you compare crash stats from the 70s to now, you can see the decline.

But as everyone on this forum knows, the hardware can fail. You can have failsafes and backups and all of that, but how many can you put on an airplane?

I have to take my hat off to the pilot. I also think an emergency override, so that the pilot could have actually operated some parts of the plane the old-fashioned way, sounds good. Would the stupid pilots panic and use the override whent he computer was doing a better job? I don't know. But good pilots shouldn't have to rely on their plane's gliding ability...

RIAA told to pay legal fees for harrassed defendant

what is this with lawyers?

Lawyers never start actions. People hire them for advice. Ms Andersen also had lawyers, and she clearly benefited from their help. Nobody says 'well, of course the only ones who win are the techies, who kept the RIAA computers running' or 'of course, the only ones who win are the reporters, who get big by-lines covering such storiesand jack up their salaries'.

Good lawyers cost a lot. So do all specialists. Some are more rapacious than others (as in every industry), but the majority give good value for money. I use them all the time when I get crap customer service. None of this writing letters for a year and making dozens of phone calls: the offending company gets three letters from me, one crisp letter from the solicitor, and suddenly all issues of delivery/quality etc. are solved as if by magic. Worth every penny to my lawyer.

FBI to get UK biometric database hookup?

@David Whiting

If they were to send the data by CD, I would breathe easier.

The Italians actually tried to get the USA into court over the alleged Al Qaida terrorist some American spooks snatched from uner the nose of Italian security, who had just finished building a picture of the terrorist network in their country and were going go for a group grab into jail. But the Yanks grabbed the guy off the street and stuck him on a plane to destinations and fate unknown. If they got from him anything about his Italian connections, they didn't share with the Italians.

So that made the world safer, then.

And now we want to give them a list of everybody in this country, and hope that a little typo doesn't move a twelve-year -old into the 'terrorist' category.

'worst of the worst' rendered int he twinkling of an eye

Given that the USA recently passed a law (or made a presidential pronouncement, can't remember and does it matter) saying that they could grab anyone, US citizen, citizen of another country, not just from within the US borders, but anywhere in the world, the idea of sharing info so that this can happen seems a, well, a mistake.

Anyone can be taken from any country without due process at any time. That's the basic. I don't think the USA would snatch a high-profile politicians or businessman, but anybody who has a name identical to one ont he 'worst of the worst' list, or one similar to it, or indeed anyone whose name happens to get onto the list by accident, can be here one minute, and Gitmo or some Syrian torture-pit the next.

Brighton professor bans Google

college students using any encyclopedia??

At university level, no encyclopedia is a citable source. At that level, they should be using scholarly information, i.e. grown-up books. Nothing on the web will give you the depth of research, wisdom, and interwoven understanding of Europe circa 1610 as anything by, say, J H Elliott or G Parker. Elliott's book on Olivares is matched in depth, breadth and knowledge by NOTHING on the internet. But then, my background is medieval history, and you need to know medieval latin as well as history of that period and preceding periods to be able to understand the 'why' of what was going on in, say, 1294, and to write anything intelligent about it.

Media Studies, now that's quite a different matter.

Scarlett Johansson to play Courtney Love?

No need to gasp

After all, didn't Ida Lupino play Charlotte Bronte?

Giant hydrogen cloud menaces Milky Way

luckily, we know what to do

Duck and cover

Head banker leaves job over Muslim gaffe

it's offensive to non-Muslims

You don't have to be the target to dislike a joke. When I go to any meeting, I don't expect or want to hear 'jokes' that denigrate or make fun of anyone -- if the joke had used an anti-Jewish pun, would we have been amused? Or if it was something tasteless against Christians? Or a pun playing on disability? This sort of humour is not welcome. I don't want to be in an atmosphere where this kind of humour is seen as acceptable. I don't want to be shifting uncomfortably in my seat, or having to minute an objection, because some crass guy who believe jokes are a good substitute for conversation has decided to share a 'witticism' with me, when I am at work. In fact, not in the pub, either. Grow up. Don't give me 'it was just a joke' as a defence. If you don't have these feelings and thoughts in your head, you never make a joke like that.

I remember looking at a company photo with someone, and she started to point out everyone she knew or thought was Jewish. That was how she saw the world: Jews and the rest of us. And not in a good way. Tellers of jokes like that have the same kind of stuff in their heads. It's not the joke that offends per se, but that he thought he could tell it and that his listeners shared his world view.

MoD sorts out 'turkey' helicopters for Xmas

troops are always the ones to pay

The jackasses who project-managed this will have their careers held back a bit, at most. The higher-ups will collect their MBEs and all of that. And our lads on the ground, who serve their queen and country with their lives, well, they can just get maimed or killed, because a few tommies are clearly cheaper than one helicopter.

Confusion marks StarOffice anniversary

fax machine

Very useful if you work on digital documents but the recipient is in the 3rd world and only has a fax.

Space brains resign over efforts to attract ET attention

Why not beam a little Reiki vibes, too?

Given that there is a good chance that there is NOBODY out there, we could send astrology charts or whale song or whatever we fancy. We will not be in danger.

It's easy to see how religions form: you start with a few odd events, people choose to believe the more outlandish explanations rather than the simple ones, because they are more fun and exciting and you can get all stirred up, and then people start organising meetings and publications, and then it gets serious and we built pyramids and temples and radio beacons.

As far as I can see, without proof of, or any rational arguments for, the existence of aliens, all this effort is on par with Government-sponsored Therapeutic Touch or kirlian energy. In short, cobblers.

Parliament's security staff lose parliament security data

I love this stuff

Every time the Government screws up, ID cards recede into the misty future. Hooray!

@anon John -- thank you! I also go Grrrrrr.

US woman launches 'Taserware' parties

under the bed for a reason

Given that she has to undergo obligatory background checks, it's the best place until she receives her blessing. Then she can hang it off her charm bracelet if she wants.

If tasers have to be out there, I'm all for women having them, but I would like them to be properly trained. Women are often shot with their own handguns, because they aren't trained to use them, only trained (if at all)to point them. In times of extreme fear and danger, it's good to be able to trust ingrained responses. It's why the police and soldiers train.

That, of course, goes for every citizen, not just women. If citizens packed tasers, would the police be as fast to use them? Or would we see even faster 'pre-emptive' tasings by the folks in blue??

Lily Allen to judge Orange women's fiction award

@anon coward

We can all point to women who earn plenty more than men, and have more power, too. I can do so in my own company. But the stats come out with depressing sameness: women are *over all* paid less than men, and women *over all* are less frequently seen in the higher echelons of management. Replace 'woman' with 'non-white male' and I suspect it would remain true.

I look at the middle and upper management of my own (very big) company and see one woman and one non-white man, out of a good round dozen. They are there, but what does that say about society as a whole? They are the exceptions.

Does that mean the woman manager here would like to win 'woman manager of the year', or the Black make manager 'Black manager of the year'? Hmmm. Don't know. Yet what are the chances of them winning 'manager of the year'?

As I said, I am not sure what to think about women-only areas of competition. I can see the place for them, and I don't think they are sexist, but I would much rather win the Man Booker Prize than the Orange Prize. Because then I would know I had been up against the toughest opposition.

Of course, to win ANY prize with money would be great. My personal competition of choice is the Lottery. Totally gender and race neutral!

ambivalent

For those not familiar with Feminism 101, oppression does not go upward. If you are not treated as equal by the group that holds power, excluding them does not oppress them. In South Africa, Black-only organisations did not oppress whites. Whites were outraged that they couldn't go anywhere and be allowed in, but their outrage did not arise from oppression, but from a limit to their (immoral) power.

Clearly, women are not oppressed in the same way. But when so many prizes, top-level jobs, (heck, even middle-manager jobs) go to 'chaps like us' or the 'face that fits', it is not suprised that women see themselves as being treated unequally.

I believe that the Orange Prize was set up because the organisers felt that the major literature awards were disproportionately being given to men, and that they could level the playing field a bit by setting up this prize.

However much I am in sympathy with them, I am also torn, because being the top in a smaller, exclusionary field is surely never as satisfying. For instance, do you want to win 'woman web designer of the year' or 'web designer of the year'? Or 'Asian manager of the year' or 'Manager of the year'?

w00t voted 'Word of the Year'

Blamestorming -- kewl

I rather like 'blamestorming'. So descriptive. in fact, I love all business-speak. It's a mixture of trying to make something sound cool and important when it's not (e.g. teleconferencing for a group phone call) and efforts to carefully avoid offending (from 'lessons' to 'lessons learned' to 'learnings' and now, since' learnings' suggests a deficiency, 'takeaways'). Words such as 'skill-set' make my day. You can see a middle manager or consultant suddenly thinking of 'let's take this off-line' and being totally, totally thrilled. Bless them, every one. Heck, I remember when 'liaising' was heard with a swift intake of breath; there was no verb variation of 'liaison', but suddenly 'liaison' was a word business people spoke, so a verb was required. (Liaison replaced, I believe, 'meeting with' .)

UK gov: Feds will get BAE bribe files when hell freezes over

no one wants to show an arm sticky to the elbow

Arms manufacturers are widely known to be in pretty much the most corrupt business on earth. They are woven so closely into their various Governments that their Government officials are merely pimps and shills for the arms traders withintheir borders.

Arms trading with the many corrupt oligarchies, tyrannies and despots around the world, including Saudi Arabia is the most seethingly corrupt part of this whole noxious slime-pit.

The UK Government, by shutting down any investigation, made by its actions a public confession to the fact that they are so far up the whazoo of the arms traders that any molecule of truth would destroy them.

You would think that the current US Administration would appreciate the UK Government's position here, being so closely acquainted with utter lies and corruption themselves, and not press the Home Office to the point of embarassment.

I guess there is no honour amongst sleazes.

Appraisals are dishonest, waste of time

game-playing with your life

I am lucky with my current manager: we both know it's a big HR game and we 'cook the books', in that he tells me how best to spin what I saw and then he endorses it. We evaluate our managers anonymously, and I give him a well-earned star rating. But we do these appraisal games for nothing. Nothing. It does not affect our pay or our prospects. It just keeps us out of trouble. And bonuses here are awarded to teams, so a couple of drongos and you kiss your money goodbye.

360 degree appraisals, where bosses get rated by their teams and everybody rates everyone else, and the bottom 10% are fired every year, is the approach taken by some big, big firms. I have never endured that, but I can see that it would be fair, at least for a company that wants only a hard-ball kind of quality.

Sadly, not every company can have 100% star-quality staff, even if they could/would pay for it. There aren't enough in the world. So appraisals are a way of making people who can't raise their standards feel bad, within a system devised by HR and top managers to keep themselves in work. Insulting for all.

British teens score a C in international science poll

The usual anecdote

My mother-in-law was a maths teacher until recently and was also an exam-marker for many years. She finally gave it up because she saw the questions being made easier every year. She felt she was no longer marking 'maths' papers but social studies papers.

But of course one anecdote is not proof of sliding standards. That can be tested by asking kids what they think of homoeopathy of Intelligent Design, or the probability of certain specific things happening (tossing heads or tails, etc.).

Only bicarbonate of soda can save mankind!

fresh fridges

Bicarb will keep every fridge on the planet smelling sweetly, and we'll have plenty left over for scones and other baked goods.

And it does scrub up a bath nicely.

Child protection site to show Scottish sex offenders

And no sex offender will change his appearance?

The truly bad will take the trouble to dye their hair, grow a moustache, whatever, and some poor innocent bloke who 'kinda looks like' the photo on the website will have his life turned into merry hell.

So this is a really good plan, uh huh.

El Reg fires up online standards converter

When does this get added to El Reg's top-level nav bar?

As it's going to be an essential tool, I really think we need an easy way to access it.

I am keen on milliHelens as units of beauty/force.

Wii grasses up cheating wife

Bowling?

I'd ask for a divorce because of the game. Infidelity and they played *bowling*? I mean, geez...

Will Darling's data giveaway kill off ID cards?

rock solid -- yes, @The Solution

I agree that 'rock solid' means 'encased in rock. Or concrete. Just like radioactive waste! Safe as safe can be...

Police Complaints joins inquest into Darling data giveaway

Investigate with the usual result

A big fine, no resignations, no blame except for some lowly worker bee, and business as usual. Isn't that what happens when the Police investigate?

Darling admits Revenue loss of 25 million personal records

Popped it in the Post

Their own courier service lost it. Scary enough. Somehow they don't have any internal tracking system (thinks: chap with a clipboard ticking parcels off), and the best, most secure system to use when theirs failed was registered post?!?

Why they can't transfer electronically is beyond belief. The news stories said that they were confident that the original discs sent had not fallen into the wrong hands. Since they don't know whose hands now hold them, how do they know?

As has been said above: and these are the people who want to run a national ID card system. Given this, we'll either all be in prison or totally, totally safe, except from those selling dodgy stocks and goldmines and Latvian girlfriends.

Americans clueless on NASA budgets

Poutine correction

Poutine is a dish of french fries (aka chips, for the UK), covered with gravy and cheese curds. Cheese curds as in sort of like cottage cheese with the whey drained off.

This dish swept Canada while I was living abroad. I'd like to think, had I been living there at the time, that I would have fought to stem the tide to the last barricade.

But as a Prime Minister, it could have won my respect.

US man dies in Taser incident

deaths per use?

We're told how safe it is, yet deaths keep accruing. Safety is in the stats. How many tasers are fired at and connect forcefully with people every day? What injuries have arisen, from the shock itself, as a result of multiple shocks, as a result of convulsion/reaction that has the victim crashing to the floor or against something that hurts him, e.g, corner of a table. I want real-life stats, not tests done on willing, healthy volunteers standing on comfy foam mats in Taser Intl's lab.

Museum archive turns up new dinosaur family

Those shovelling Victorians

The British Museum has crateloads of stuff from the Middle East. Millions to cuneiform tablets. They teach amateurs to read them and let them loose on as many as they can handle. That's how a big missing chunk fo the ancient epic poem Gilgamesh was discovered. The earlier futures trade was found by a amateur: a woman buying a famer's crop from the next summer. There are masses of amazing things waiting to be found. On one hand, I am appalled by the extent of Victorian looting. On the other hand, all these clay tablets came from what are now bombed and ruined war zones in Iraq.

The broken terror systems that killed de Menezes

Excitable boys (and girls)

I've been in a crisis (suspected gunman) and have seen people ramp themselves up, get self-important, mis-hear, want a drama, get swept up intheir own drama, and everyone gets excited and sloppy. Police like to *do* things, take actions, and in combatting terrorism it's mostly a case of listening to snitches. This is not fun. Running around with guns shouting into two-way radioes is fun. Being in a command centre is fun. Weird fun, but fun in the way soldiers can love battle. So it seems that everyone got carried away, got rattled, and did something bad.

The worst of it was it instant heaping of lies onto the dead Mr Menezes' head. We were left for a long time thinking that he ran, vaulted the barrier, was wearing a suspiciously bulky coat and so on. These were all deliberate lies. This is where the police truly showed that they could not be trusted. I wouldn't give them a water pistol, let alone anything with bullets in it. The only guy who has *really* stopped a 'terrorist' in his tracks was that chap at the Glasgow airport. No command centres there, just a 'no way, mate' and a tackle.

Wannabe US bank robber fails intelligibility test

@Michael

I too give Michael a 6.0 (Olympic style). First time I have turned heads laughing at El Reg. Brill.

Oz motorist reacts rather testily to small todger slur

slurs and responses

Slurs on someone, by hand gesture or words, is not really acceptable behaviour even if the sluree is behaving badly. But too often a little jokey gesture by a woman gets a hugely violent reaction (worse than a thrown bottle). The dick is not a sacred object.

By the way, calling a woman a lesbian is not insulting her. It is only, 90% of the time, a mis-description.

Student taser victim spared electric chair

Forced public apology

I thought this went out with the Soviets, and was currently only supported by the Chinese government.

'Comrades, I have become a better person through discipline and have improved those faults of mine that required the State to punish me deservedly.'

Yuck.

World's most gullible supermarket chain falls victim to online scam

More on hot coffee

The McD coffee was unbeleivably, third-degree burns hot. They were serving out the drive-thru window, so they knew people didn't have full control, as they had to move their cars on. An elderly woman was the passenger and was given the cup, along with other items (a not-unexpected result of ordering food). A little clumsiness resulted in the coffee spilling. Normally it would be Oh! Ouch! Shit! and a lot of mopping up. But she was extremely badly burned and terribly scarred. The first court gave her a huge amount of money because McD had been given warnings and should have anticipated something like this, but the actual amount she received was severely reduced.

Boffins dredge up oldest living animal

clam robots

And who is addressing the need for robots to assist elderly clams in socialising, feeding, sitting on the ocean floor, etc.?

Schoolkid chipping trial 'a success'

why don't they want to be in school?

I support a scholarship scene for junior/high school students in Kenya. At that level, education has to be paid for. Kids do not tolerate 'time wasting' visitors and western teachers, i.e chatting, anecdotes. Some children turn to prostitution to get the money to pay for schooling. These children don't need chips: they are desperate, desperate, for education, and theirs would seem basic to us. I sometimes want to scream at kids I see bunking off from school. Kids their age suffer to get what they spurn.

[www.canadianharambee.ca, if anyone is interested]

US demands air passengers ask its permission to fly

let them shoot self in foot

I try to make every flight to North or South America either direct or avoiding the USA, i.e. changing planes in Toronto or Mexico City, and not on an American airline, even though I like them. I stopped going about 2003. If you want wide-open spaces, try Canada or Argentina.

Friends of mine whi ski now go to Whistler, Fernie, Castlegar, Jasper and Banff instead of the USA and say these places are cheaper and the people nicer. America's loss is Canada's gain.

I have liberal American friends who feel aggrieved that they are lumped in when people slag off America. Start protesting in the streets then, mates.

El Reg deploys (extra) comment icons

screaming woman

El Reg has a nice little photo of a woman screaming in shock or horror. That would be a nice icon, especially if sexist comments or just plain horrible nonsense (visualise Venn diagram for these) needs to be flagged up.

DA suppressed Alabama Baptist pastor autopsy

who gets the protection of anonymity?

Why does anyone's death, bondage-loded or not, get covered up? What makes this guy so special (and no, 'pastor' is not special enough. 'President' is not special enough) that his personal life needs to be protected after death? The only reason I can see is if the police are hunting a partner, because (depending on if his hands were tied before or behind him) there had to be someone else in the room, who has at least been negligent.

I agree with Finnbar's point that the issue is censorship of the crony kind.

Preterite peter-out: How the end beginned

Neil Diamond, as usual, leads the way

I remember the immortal word 'brang' being rhymed to 'sang' -- why have 'brung' or 'brought' when we can reduce complexity and have a great rhyme?